A quietly intriguing column from the brains behind QI, the BBC quiz show. This
week: QI stakes out some vampires
.

One thing vampire children are taught is, never run with a wooden stake.

Jack Handey

Vampire origins

The first use of the word “vampire” in English wasn’t until 1734, when it was mentioned in a book called Travels of Three English Gentlemen. Although the idea of the “undead” returning to attack the living is ancient and occurs in many cultures, the bloodsucking vampire we recognise today arose in south-eastern Europe in the 17th century. Versions of the word “vampire” exist in all the Slavic languages and some linguists have traced it back to ubyr, the Tatar word for “witch”.

Becoming a vampire

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People at risk of joining the undead include those born with a caul, those whose mothers did not eat salt during their pregnancy, seventh sons or daughters, those who have been jumped over by a cat and those who die an “unnatural” death.

You don’t even have to be a person. Anthropologists in the Forties were told by Bosnian gipsies that pumpkins left in the house too long “might become vampires”. This apparently didn’t involve bloodsucking but did involve the pumpkins making a “Brr, brrr, brrr” noise and generally getting under everyone’s feet.

Preventing attacks

Other than garlic, telling stories or sleeping the wrong way up in your bed is enough to deter many vampires.

Also, vampires suffer from arithmomania – they love to count, and scattering a pile of seeds means they will immediately be obsessed with counting them, giving you plenty of time to run away.

Don’t overdo it. In 1973, a Polish immigrant living in Stoke-on-Trent choked to death on the piece of garlic he had placed in his mouth before going to bed. Police found his body surrounded by bags of salt and even the keyholes had been blocked with garlic.

Vampire populations

According to physics professor Costas Efthimiou of the University of Central Florida in Orlando, if vampires feed with even a tiny fraction of the frequency that they are depicted to in the movies and folklore, then the human race would have been wiped out quite quickly after the first vampire appeared.

In 1600 (when the first notable modern writings on vampires appeared), the global population was 537 million. Assuming that one vampire fed once a month, and that each of his (or her) victims turned into a vampire, and none was staked out or otherwise disposed of, there would be two vampires in the first month, four in the next, eight in the next, et cetera. All humans would be vampires within two and a half years.

Vampiric behaviour

A Serbian tale speaks of a vampire who regularly visited a woman in the village and neither her husband nor the villagers could do anything about it.

It later turned out the “vampire” was a neighbour she was having an affair with: a cloak, and a dose of superstition, provided the perfect disguise.

Vampire bats

Bats were a late addition to vampire mythology as travellers to the New World returned telling tales of winged bloodsuckers.

Vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) feed mainly on cattle, horses, tapirs and turkeys. If they do dine on humans, they usually go for the big toe, not the neck, but can only manage two tablespoons at one sitting. Their saliva contains “draculin”, which prevents the blood they are drinking from clotting.

They are the only mammals to live exclusively on blood. It is a relatively low-energy food, so if a vampire bat fails to score over two consecutive nights, it will die. To offset this, they have a sophisticated system in which adult females feed one another. They even remember who has helped them and make sure they get repaid first.

Other vampires

Bats are the animals most often associated with vampires, but there are also vampire moths, vampire catfish, vampire snails and a vampire finch. Vampire finches are found on the Galápagos Islands; they puncture the skin of boobies and drink their blood.

The vampire squid may well be the most inappropriately named animal in the world. It is more closely related to octopuses than squid, but is neither, belonging to its own order, Vampyromorphida.

Nor does it drink blood; rather, it feeds on small crustaceans and fish and spends most of its time hanging motionless in the water.